Monday, September 12, 2016

Stories below the fold

...years ago, the great Paul Gottfried remarked that the country had long been taken over by the Meathead generation and their ethics. The Archie Bunkers were all gone. By that he meant traditional working and middle class America had been lost and the country was now run by fashionable liberals, who occupied the first ruling elite in history to be actively working to destroy the foundation on which it rest

Time flies when you’re not causing deaths of tens of millions of your compatriots.
China’s “Global Times” reports from Shaoshan where thousands of people have gathered to remember the village’s most famous son (of a bitch). ...
Then the report goes for laughs:Despite Western focus on Mao’s mistakes, especially for starting the devastating Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the Chinese government still recognizes and highlights his undeniable role in creating a new China from his errors...
“Mistakes” is a nice euphemism for directly and indirectly murdering around 70 million people. Example: “Oops honey, I just wiped Great Britain off the map”.

...In time their smoke and ash became but words
In stories told at dinner, told by rote,
Or in the comments made by magazines
For whom the "larger issues" were of note.
In time their faces faded with the rains,
The little altars thick with wax were scraped,
But still beneath clear plastic they endure
Reminding us that we have not escaped.
Their silence keeps me sleepless for I know.

children are not born with a universal, dedicated tool for learning grammar. Instead they inherit the mental equivalent of a Swiss Army knife: a set of general-purpose tools—such as categorization, the reading of communicative intentions, and analogy making, with which children build grammatical categories and rules from the language they hear around them.

so brains is hardwired to allow kids to learn patterns of language but are not hardwired for "grammar" per se? Works for me...

Babies as young as six to seven months old can remember a sign, according to experts (Glairon, 2003). By eight months, children can begin to sign single words and imitate gestures, and by 24 months, children can sign compound words and full sentences

Prof Sophie Scott explains that when someone laughs, there is no real movement of the tongue, jaw, soft palate and lips....

Laughter is a non-verbal emotional expression controlled by an evolutionarily "older" brain system, one that looks after vocalisation in all mammals (unlike speech).
This is why a stroke can rob someone of the ability to speak, but leave them able to laugh and cry.

A paralysed woman wearing a "bionic" suit has completed the Great North Run, five days after she started it. Claire Lomas, from Leicestershire, was paralysed from the chest down in a riding accident in 2007. She began the half marathon, which runs from Newcastle to South Shields, on Wednesday and crossed the finish line at about 10:00 BST. The 36-year-old, who is 16 weeks pregnant, said she was "over the moon" to finish the run.